When you take a trip to Canada to visit a used book sale, you never know what might pop up. However, the odds are pretty good that there will be a selection of hockey publications.
In this case, I noticed a book called "A League of Our Own," written by a couple of familiar names Not only does it follow an unusual story, but it does it in an unusual way. This, it turns out, is a book with a split personality.
Let's go back to the NHL's 2020-21 season, which to be accurate started in January of 2021. The previous regular season had been cut down by the Covid-190 pandemic, and a "bubble" was set up in the following summer for the playoffs. The league managed to crown a champion, but conditions hadn't improved that much by the fall of 2020. Eventually, the NHL decided to stage a shortened season that would begin in January of 2021 and finish, well, whenever it was finished. A variety of rules were put in place to try to prevent a league-wide outbreak of the virus.
But certain concessions were necessary under the circumstances. Travel across the international border of the United States and Canada was much more difficult than normal, if not impossible. The league opted to set up an all-Canadian division for the first time in history. Teams in Montreal, Ottawa, Toronto, Winnipeg, Calgary, Edmonton and Vancouver sure saw a lot of each other during those months. The rest of the league consisted of three divisions filled with American teams. Therefore, no Canada-U.S. matchups were set until the final four teams of the playoffs were set, by which time everyone hoped travel would be a bit easier.
Somehow, it worked - more or less. Some games had to be postponed when too many players on a particular team were put on the Covid-19 list. The schedule was adjusted on the fly constantly, and everyone connected with the teams had to be very careful about accidental "bumps." But we had a season, and a champion was crowned.
We are in good hands here with the authors. Cox is a veteran hockey writers with some good books to his credit, while Podnieks is more of a hockey researcher who clearly knows his history. They split the writing duties here, as Cox wrote about the 2021 season while Podnieks stuck to bigger topics in the hockey history of the seven Canadian cities. I noticed a couple of facts that were wrong along the way that concerned the Buffalo Sabres (a quote from 1970 and goaltending duties in 1977), but they won't concern too many people besides me.
Cox has the tougher assignment of the two, and it shows. He has to cover seven teams spread out over almost 3,000 miles (Vancouver to Montreal), all during a pandemic. At least the teams played each other a lot in the somewhat abbreviated schedule. Still, it's tough to make those games interesting in hindsight. Podnieks goes back to interesting portions of the seven cities' hockey history, and raises some excellent points about where some particular teams went right and went wrong.
So ... why isn't this book on Amazon, even the Canadian version? The authors self-published the book, and made an exclusive deal with Indigo (think of a store like Barnes and Noble in Canada, eh?) for distribution. No wonder this is hard to find in America. It's a rather professional job as these things go, even if the sideways photos and their captions are a little jarring.
"A League of Our Own" is an interesting little souvenir of a particular time and place. Maybe it's not a great fit for American audiences, but those who stumble across it no doubt will learn some things about hockey in Canada along the way.
Three stars
Learn more about this book from Indigo.com.
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